1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a tape printer capable of feeding a tape forward and backward.
2. Related Art
A known printer has a tape movement path along which a print tape is fed forward and backward, a print head that performs printing on the print tape, a cutter that is provided on the downstream side of the print head on the tape movement path and cuts off the print tape, and a platen roller capable of feeding the print tape forward and backward along the tape movement path. When such a printer directly performs the following print process on the tape, from which a printed part has been separated by the cutter, in succession to a previous print process, a blank is produced at the downstream-side end of the print tape by a distance equivalent to the distance between the print head and the cutter. Therefore, in order to narrow the blank at the downstream-side end of the print tape to a greater extent, the printer feeds the print tape backward by the distance equivalent to the distance between the print head and the cutter at the time of starting the print process (see JP-A-2009-255334).
Since a tape printer like the known printer separates a printed part of a tape after a print process, it performs post-print feed to feed the tape forward such that the upstream-side end of an image printed on the tape is positioned on the downstream side of a cut position. A forward feed amount of the tape in the post-print feed becomes greater than the distance between a print position and the cut position. However, for example, when a user wants to obtain a tape in which an image in the following print process is printed in succession to an image in a previous print process, the tape printer performs the following print process without performing a cut operation after post-print feed in succession to the previous print process. In this case, when the tape printer directly performs the following print process, an image distance is produced between the image in the previous print process and the image in the following print process by a distance (length) substantially equivalent to a forward feed amount of the tape in the post-print feed. If the produced image distance is great, the tape is wastefully consumed.